Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Routine. Whether it’s school or work, we are conditioned for routine, which is a double-edged sword. Sure it brings comfort, stability, and predictability. But it also harvests complacency, boredom, closed-mindedness, and pure monotony. You can lose yourself in the process of going on auto-pilot and waking up, going to work/school, doing whatever you want in your limited free time, sleeping, and repeating. I don’t know about you, but no matter how interesting my days are, I get REALLY bored with this after a while. I need to switch it up or my head goes to a bad place. To counter, I try to incorporate opportunities to break the routine every day. Jed was not immune to these feelings; this 18-month traverse down the globe was partially inspired by the boredom and monotony of daily life as a lawyer in America. We can tend to fall asleep at the wheel when we become too routined. It’s robotic. Hence the title: To Shake the Sleeping Self. Traveling and exploring new places, faces, and wonders of the world is one powerful antidote to this boredom. However, it doesn’t take extravagant travel or 18 months on a bike to get the positive effects, you can build adventure into every day. In every day, embrace the elements of routine that you need as staples, but find opportunities to break the routine and seek newness. I had high hopes for this book, that was pushed by several celebrity endorsements, but it fell short of many expectations. It's an incredible goal, to cycle from Oregon to Patagonia and 'shake your sleeping self', but sadly the writer accomplished neither of these intentions. Full Book Name: To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret One last thing that bothers me is that there's no resolution with regards to the conflict about his sexuality. I'm not saying I want to him to write a conversation that didn't actually happen, but it would've been nice to know if his mother has become more accepting of him and what their relationship is like. It was something that was focused on so heavily in the text that to not have any sort of resolution just didn't feel right. Also, another previously-unknown-to-Jed traveler named Harry Devert goes missing on a similar trek around the same time and Jed invokes him like a spirit guide and then never mentions him again.
but can serve to be an excellent refresher of To Shake the Sleeping Self for either a student or teacher. Character and Object Descriptions As far as the actual writing craft is concerned...it was okay. I know a lot of people are moved by some of the philosophical stuff in this book. But for me...it was just stuff. Again, it didn't feel authentic to me. There are all these insights that I know we're supposed to see as deeply profound, but they sounded like any number of things that could be found in a mediocre self-help book. Finally, his interpretation of people he meets and his descriptions of places I found banal and at times insulting. He called Lima 'dirty and annoying' and described a community of Andean people in Peru as 'vacant looking'. If someone he meets isn't his type of person (aka not into coffee and craft beer) he isn't interested, "For the most part, my brain automatically discards the vast majority of people as forgettable".Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity fueled by the author's self indulgence is how little he seems to interact or care about any of the people or cultures he's encountering. He couldn't have been more obviously using Latin america as a tool for him to feel a feeling or fart out a pseudo deep thought while looking at a mountain. Not learning spanish is just the start of it. He seemed so put off by any food or drink that weren't street tacos and craft beer, made some pretty tokenized observations about native people he does encounter (who he cant understand, obviously), and spends the majority of his travel time with other white travelers. He makes some comment toward the end about how travel creates empathy and space to see more perspectives and I just wondered how different this book would have been if he had actually interacted with locals and their native food and customs rather than driving all across mexico city looking for a hipster coffee shop run by someone who speaks English. Nothing feels resolved by the end, his mother calls him disgusting for being gay and then he sweeps it alway and never confronts the issue, acting like their relationship is sunshine and rainbows (if only he doesn’t bring up a major part of himself).
When his mother, Barbara, turns seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: Our parents won’t live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society—disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara’s world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven’t allowed. That moment was the beginning of a bunch of little inconsistencies that just rubbed me the wrong way. There's a moment where he talks about taking a hit from a gravity bong and it having no effect on him, then later on puking his guts out after smoking weed because he's a 'lightweight'.
Even after all this time, The sun never says to the Earth, You owe me, Look what happens with a love like that, It lights the whole world.
To Shake the Sleeping Self is a memoir by Jedidiah Jenkins. Jenkins was born in the early 1980s in Nashville, Tennessee. He was raised by two devoutly Christian parents in an Evangelical Christian community. When Jenkins was still a child, he realized that he was homosexual. He felt shame and fear, as his community believed homosexuality to be unnatural and sinful. Jenkins tried to repress his sexuality. Jenkins’ parents—Peter and Barbara—gained national attention in the late 1970s by traveling across the width of the United States entirely on foot. Peter and Barbara then married and had children. However, they eventually divorced after it was revealed that peter was having extramarital affairs. Jenkins mostly has a good relationship with his parents, although his mother still disapproves of his homosexuality. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Jenkins, Jedidiah. To Shake the Sleeping Self. Convergent Books, 2018. Surround himself with friends/family who are able to meet up with him along the way to 'hang out' for days and even weeks at a time. text by "doing" rather than simply studying. Fun activities are a great way to keep students interested and engaged With winning candor, Jedidiah Jenkins takes us with him as he bicycles across two continents and delves deeply into his own beautiful heart." (Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things )
This section of the lesson plan contains 30 Daily Lessons. Daily Lessons each have a specific objective and offer This is much more than a book about a bike ride. This is a deep soul deepening us. Jedidiah Jenkins is a mystic disguised as a millennial.” (Tom Shadyac, author of Life’s Operating Manual) He doesn't seem to understand the inherent privilege he has as a white American man, even though there are times where he mentions it in relation to the people he meets on his journey. But it feel almost flippant. He admits he's privileged, says he feels guilty, but doesn't actually seem to grow beyond that. I mean, seriously. He is a 30-year old man who is able to: Every time Jed and Weston get to a new town and drink craft beer. Half a shot if it's just regular beer.and that's another thing. if you are looking for a bike tour book not written by a bro, may i suggest the forgotten 1981 gem "Daisy, Daisy: A Grandmother's Journey Across America on a Bicycle" by Christian Miller? because, dear reader, this guy is a bro. whether he's playing beer pong, accidentally throwing up in his underwear (seriously) or wanting desperately to quit but not doing so because he doesn't want to be seen as a "pussy," he is a bro. and constantly railing about the pressure he feels to be a "real man" despite being an unathletic, feminine, closeted celibate christian gay guy. and i get that's a real issue, but the way it was written i just didn't care. focus on specific chapters within To Shake the Sleeping Self. This allows you to test and review the book as you proceed through a deeper understanding of To Shake the Sleeping Self by describing what they've read, rather than just recalling it. The short
But the most frustrating part of the book was Jenkins absolute refusal to engage with the conflicts between his religious world view and sexuality critically. As myself someone who grew up in a deeply religious context as a young gay man, it was frustrating to literally read a man being confronted by the oppressions these religious institutions were putting on him and him refusing to recognize that these institutions were the very things CAUSING his unhappiness. Not Weston, not his sexuality, not his desire to kiss boys, or be naked at home, or etc. But the fact that he could not reconcile the fact that perhaps he has unprocessed traumas from being a young gay boy raised in a toxically Christian environment. On a deeper level, I was sad for Jenkins over the missed opportunities on this trip. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for transformation and growth. And yet, Jenkins always seemed to stop short of REALLY pushing himself out of his comfort zone. In 2014, Jenkins decides to set out on a biking journey from Oregon, through Mexico, Central America, South America, and, finally, to Patagonia. Much the journey is framed by his co-conspirator, Weston (who leaves 2/3 of the way through the book), and their confrontations about Weston's penchant for weed and Jedidiah's reluctance to think critically about his conservative religious upbringing despite its clashes with his sexuality. Though Jenkins attempts to frame much of the conflict between he and Weston as being about Weston's smoking habits, hippie-ish world views, and poor financial planning, much of it, in fact, comes off as a snobbish, classist guy being made unhappy by the burdens of being confronted by the fact that it takes financial privilege to bike across to continents. Disclosure - I received this book as a promotion, through Crown Publishing and PRH, and Jed's social media promotion team. THANK YOU! He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Customer reviews
can apply it. They require more thought than multiple choice questions, but are shorter than the essay questions. Multiple Choice Questions So many mind opening experiences he turned down because of his preconceived beliefs and ideas. It’s awesome that he feels strongly about them but unfortunately it doesn’t make for an exciting story.
Great Deal 
New Comment